Whistleblower Blues
Hentoff, Nat
Ashcroft Watch Nat Hentoff Whistleblower Blues For two years, Democrat Patrick Leahy and Republican Charles Grassley usually influential Senators, have been persistently trying to get the Attorney...
...Edmonds sued the FBI to get her job back, but in May of this year, as reported by 9/11 Citizens Watch, "the FBI retroactively classified information about Edmonds's claims provided to Congressional staff more than two years ago, leading Senators to remove previously public material from their websites and putting staff in danger of violating national security law by discussing information that previously had been in the public realm...
...I will stay on this story because, as Michael Kirkpatrick, a lawyer involved in the case for Public Citizen, told the Project on Government Oversight: "We have been doing national security legislation for more than twenty years and . . . this is the most egregious misuse of the classification authority we've seen...
...For all of FBI Director Robert Mueller's talk of how he has changed "the culture" of the FBI, that hasn't happened...
...Yet that is exactly what Ashcroft is doing...
...The bureau, said Grassley, "needs to be turned upside down...
...As John Roberts, then chief of the FBI's Internal Affairs Department, said of Edmonds's firing on that 60 Minutes program: "You have a certain group [here] that will continue to protect itself" It's still going on...
...Directed by John Ashcroft, the cover-up was validated-at least for now-by U.S...
...He is the author of "The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance...
...Partially declassified sections of the reports are expected to be available at some point...
...60 Minutes broke the story in October 2002, as Edmonds, dismissed in March of that year, told how- although there was a huge backlog of untranslated FBI wiretaps and interrogation of suspected terrorists-she had been ordered to work very slowly so the FBI could get an increase in its budget for more translators...
...Can we depend on the Attorney General to adjudicate this...
...Walton acted on the urging of the Attorney General, who has wielded the rarely invoked State Secrets Privilege to prevent Edmonds's charges of FBI incompetence and corruption from becoming public...
...Moreover, she discovered that a colleague had ties to organizations and people targeted for FBI surveillance...
...Grassley told 60 Minutes that Edmonds's charges were "absolutely credible" and had been confirmed by others in the FBI...
...Edmonds is appealing...
...And Edmonds denounced Ashcrofts "relentless fight against me and my information...
...FBI Director Mueller says, however, she was not retaliated against because of that...
...Six days later, after I was told by the inspector general's spokesman that Leahy and Grassley would be getting copies of these three reports, they did arrive at the Senate...
...But the two Senators and their staffs are forbidden to release any of that information to the public because Ashcroft still classifies it...
...District Judge Reggie Walton in Washington on July 6 when he dismissed Edmonds's lawsuit...
...Classification is to keep secret information that is sensitive...
...The Justice Department's Inspector General Fine reports that Edmonds was fired in part because of her whistle-blowing activity...
...It is not to suppress debate over [previously] widely public information...
...Ashcroft Watch Nat Hentoff Whistleblower Blues For two years, Democrat Patrick Leahy and Republican Charles Grassley usually influential Senators, have been persistently trying to get the Attorney General to do justice in the case of fired FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, a linguist and translator hired soon after 9/11 because of her fluency in Middle Eastern languages...
...Nat Hentoff is a columnist for The Village Voice, Editor & Publisher, and The Progressive...
...On July 9, Leahy and Grassley wrote a stern letter to Ashcroft, Mueller, and Glenn Fine (the Justice Department's inspector general), demanding copies of Fine's several reports on Edmonds's allegations, which Ashcroft has classified...
...Said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists: "Secrecy has been allowed to trump the judicial process...
Vol. 68 • September 2004 • No. 9
